John A. Macready and Oakley G. Kelly: Pioneering Aviators

     The
dream of soaring on heavenly winds to distant destinations has been the
aspirations of mankind from time immemorial. During the 1920s four Army
pilots, through their aerial achievements, furthered the fulfillment of
that centuries old ambition and herein lies their remarkable stories. The
first of these pioneering feats began on a clear afternoon of May 2, 1923,
at precisely 12:36 and 53 seconds from Roosevelt-Hazelhurst Field at
Westbury, Long Island, N.Y., when Lts. Oakley Kelly and John A. Macready
departed in a Fokker T-2 (it actually carried, according to military
files, the designation F.IV) bound for Rockwell Field located on the north
end of Coronado Island (now North Island Naval Base) on San Diego Bay,
California.
     Over a decade earlier, in February 1911, Glenn
Curtiss had signed a three-year contract with the owner of North Island
for the establishment of a flying school, but within a year the Army’s
Signal Corps Aviation School was established at that location for the
training of military pilots after moving from College Park, Md. The
airfield on Coronado Island was named in memory of Lt. Lewis C. Rockwell
who was killed in an aviation accident on September 25, 1912, along with
Corporal Frank S. Scott, at the old flying base before it relocated to
California. Of historical note, Corporal Scott was the first enlisted
member of the military air service to be killed in an aviation accident.
     Kelly has left us a detailed description of how
he and his colleague, Lt. Muir S. Fairchild, had conceived the idea of
flying nonstop across the continent in the winter of 1921-1922 and then
set about getting support for this perilous journey.
     Ridiculed by his colleagues at McCook Field,
Dayton, Ohio, for assuming that pilots could stand the strain of a
crosscountry flight, nonetheless, Kelly and Fairchild were convinced it
could be accomplished. Kelly later wrote:

In order to promote the
idea, a large map of the United States showing the proposed route from
New York to San Diego was posted on the wall in my office near the
entrance to the pilot’s locker room. Shortly the inevitable happened,
when Col. Thurman H. Bane, Commanding Officer at McCook Field at that
time, came walking in to don flying clothing and paused to inquire, "What’s
this?"  In those days a good story was necessary to secure
approval of a cross-country trip over 100 miles. Later events indicated
that from that moment we were on our way except for approval from
Washington, and the all important feature of finding an airplane capable
of making the flight.

     One
of the potential aircraft that was considered for the flight was a Fokker
single-engine monoplane of the F.IV design, which was an enlarged version
of the commercial aircraft, the F.III. Because of Fokker’s contributions
to the German war effort from 1914-1918 . . . 

[PDF of
Complete Bibliography and Foot Note]